Principal, Quality Assurance

Description

In this role, you will lead end‑to‑end quality management across Pearson Qualifications (PQ), ensuring the secure, reliable and compliant development and delivery of qualifications that learners and institutions trust. This role aligns with industry‑level titles such as Head of Quality Management or Quality Assurance Director.

This role exists to safeguard and continuously strengthen the quality of qualification development and delivery across Pearson Qualifications. You will design, embed and improve a robust Qualifications Quality Management Framework aligned to Pearson’s Global Quality Standards Framework and regulatory expectations, enabling quality‑by‑design across teams and maintaining oversight and accountability through governance forums.

• Designing and embedding a single, centralised view of quality performance across PQ
• Defining quality gates and acceptance criteria, and ensuring audit‑ready documentation
• Leading readiness assessments and dry runs ahead of peak series and key development milestones to ensure secure, reliable delivery
• Turning audit findings, incidents and near‑misses into systemic improvements
• Building integrated dashboards and early warning indicators that surface trends, outliers and control effectiveness, linked to risk and incident tooling.
• Partnering with the Pearson Qualifications Transformation programme to embed learnings and end‑to‑end quality and process improvements in transformed products and services
• Equipping teams through concise training, playbooks and coaching to embed quality‑by‑design, and driving senior stakeholder decisions via governance forums.

• Establish a clear, audit‑ready Quality Management Framework
• Embed quality governance rhythms and reporting into Qualifications Reform, Transformation and Operational Delivery Governance forums
• Prioritise and review high‑risk processes in partnership with Risk and Internal Audit
• Stand up a single source of truth to visibly track quality performance with dashboards, control metrics and early warning indicators
• Lead at least one readiness exercise or dry run and initiate plans for identified gaps
• Kick off a targeted capability uplift plan and establish a senior‑stakeholder governance engagement cadence

Unlike many quality roles that focus on assurance alone, this position combines strategy, governance, operational execution and continuous improvement. You will operate at the intersection of quality, risk, regulatory compliance and qualification development and delivery, providing an independent assurance voice into go/no‑go and trade‑off decisions, while empowering teams to own quality and driving accountability at senior levels. This is a visible, high‑impact role with senior stakeholder engagement and business unit‑wide influence.

We focus on outcomes, not task lists.

• A fully embedded, audit‑ready Quality Management Framework aligned to ISO and regulatory standards
• A single source of truth for quality performance with clear early warning indicators and integrated risk linkages
• Timely, verified closure of quality related audit findings
• Improved operational resilience and measurable learner and customer outcomes
• Teams demonstrating improved quality capability and ownership, with a visible shift toward quality‑by‑design

• Design and embed the Quality Management Framework and governance model
• Lead the end‑to‑end quality lifecycle for qualifications from design and development through results release and certification.
• Strengthen integration between quality, risk, incident management and audit functions
• Uplift capability and culture across teams and drive decisions via governance with accountable senior stakeholders

• Quality governance, standards, operating rhythms and escalation paths aligned with PMO governance
• Readiness simulations, contingency planning and resilience exercises for quality‑critical scenarios.
• RCA (Root Cause Analysis), Corrective and Preventative Action (CAPA) and systemic continuous improvement…